Behind the Counter: Shop Lives from Market Stall to Supermarket - Softcover

Behind the Counter reveals the largely hidden personal stories of shopworkers. Corner shops, `high-class' grocers, dress shops and department stores are brought to life through letters, records and the workers' own diaries and memoirs. For the most part, shopworkers were expected to work extremely long hours, to be obedient and subservient, and even to `live in' as if they were domestic servants. Shop life was not easy, even in the twentieth century. Although the trade union movement, the co-operative movement and the concerns of some enlightened employers made life a good deal better for workers, they remain among the lowest paid even today. Their history, spiced with personal anecdotes and everyday humour, provides a fascinating and lively insight into social change and working conditions. It is also a telling portrait of our changing relationship with shopping as it becomes less a service industry than a branch of the entertainment world.

Dr Pamela Horn lectured in economic and social history at Oxford Polytechnic, (now Oxford Brookes University), for over twenty years. She had written a number of books on social history topics covering the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century life. That includes several books on child life and schooling during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Pamela sadly passed away in 2014.